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My paper sculptures are best described as functional art. They were first inspired by doodling natural forms very reminiscent of the inside of a cabbage when I was on long phone conversations that went nowhere in particular, sometimes looping back on themselves, just like the lines. Gradually these acquired pointy bits and became leafy textures, especially once I decided to create paper foliage for a photographic set.

One night, years after first making paper foliage for a set design, I had insomnia and decided to cut a new set of blinds for the bedroom window resulting in a cascade of paper leaves coming into the room over the curtain rail. They brought me much joy till I sold the house a year or two later. Best of all, I didn’t tire of looking at them. It was like looking at a tree. The pattern wasn’t irritating, unlike the repetitive pattern on a curtain.

After developing these sculpted blinds for my bedroom, I became inspired by other textures and patterns in nature, like bubbles in water or pebbles on riverbeds; water falling and foaming as waves break on the beach; lichen, bark; kelp, and so on.

Inspiration is everywhere, in the form of fractal design in nature: trees branching, galaxies whirling, mandalas radiating and shells spiralling; it’s almost overwhelming.

DappleShades can be used as wall-hangings, window treatments or room-dividers. You will probably come up with more uses if you are an events co-ordinator, a wedding planner or design exhibition stands.

Over to you!

Foliar, Hokusai, Lichen, Cascade and Kelp

Foliar

Foliar was the first style I developed.

There were a few false starts. Holes and gaps developed in the designs as the panels sagged with time, and so I had to solve that with a bit of engineering.

Lichen

Lichen doesn’t have a panel of its own yet, but this sample gives you some idea of how it looks.

A design with no holes in it, this style is suitable for a wall or a window where little or no light is required to enter, or where one needs greater privacy. I may well develop this also as one of the vertical blind alternatives, with a shaped border rather than a straight edge.

Hokusai

It was a great experience to have a friend buy a set of custom-made ‘Hokusai’ style panels for his wife’s birthday. I checked on them periodically.

My first commission in the Lichenstyle

After four years, the top was looking a bit wavy, as you can see in the image above. So future gaps for hooks will be 5mm apart instead of 10cm as you see in this pic. In this particular case, the client was perfectly happy though and refused to let me fix them. They had come through four years of strong winds at the window and were otherwise holding up extremely well.

Cascade

Another unexpected client was my future daughter-in-law, who requested 80 wedding invites. For these I used the ‘Cascade’ style to form an A5 folder, into which they inserted another folded piece of paper in burnt-orange, containing the happy news.

cascade panel

Later, I incorporated some of these into this vertical blind.

Kelp

Below is the Kelp style, which is envisioned as long strips, (about 2m) to replace boring vertical blinds.

The top has a self-loop, which can be fastened to a curtain rail, or be cut off and fitted to vertical rail fittings.

Like the narrow folia panels, these will be produced in three different designs, which will then repeat. This prevents the eye becoming obsessed with the repeating patterns, and rather reflects nature, with its similar but not identical design.

Entire Kelp designDetail of Kelp style

About

Dappleshades are unique in that they bring the textures and patterns found in nature, to elegant paper sculptures. I’m Savyra Meyer-Lippold and I started trading as Dappleshades in 2010. I live near Cape Town in Fish Hoek with my husband Stephan and son Tony Scott who does all our tracings with his legendary patience.

We relaunched Dappleshades as Shylight on the 16th May 2015, but this has turned out to be an ill-advised idea, so as of 21 November 2018, it’s back to the original name.

Paper sculpture has formed part of my work for years, sometimes as packaging concepts or an illustration style; a paper landscape for a Beacon shoot; ‘foliage’ for an exhibition stand…

Detail of exhibition stand for a 4 x 4 car hire company

There was even a moth puppet (see below) for ‘Tallulah (a very small love story)’ a stop-motion animation which was shown among others at the Design Indaba Expo in February 2011. I think that’s how I found this brilliant material I’m using, because that puppet needed to be resilient. I had only one!

Part of the process of making the Tallulah puppet

I also owe profound thanks to Marina Kotze, who sent me in the direction of Tyvek in my search for a very resilient but beautiful paper-like material. After positive comments on the paper-foliage blinds in my home, I launched DappleShades, beginning with the Foliar range.

This synthetic paper resembles rice-paper in its beautiful translucency and silky texture, is UV-resistant, very hard to tear, is fire-retardant and even washable – but gently, because creases take a bit of massaging to get out. Here’s a video from the Dappleshades Facebook page, instructing one how to do exactly that.

Most of the panels are individual art works that are handmade and can therefore be custom fitted to any window. We are planning to produce them in greater numbers though, using water-jet cutting, a technology that’s perfect for this purpose, and will soon be able to offer them to a wider market and obviously for a lower cost.

They’ll range in price depending on the size and design. Prices for the machine-produced product will be announced soon.

The beauty of these designs in a practical sense is that there is no limit to the length or breadth of the space to be filled, since one buys more panels to fill a space width-ways, and if they are hand-cut, almost any length can be specified and the material ordered accordingly.

There are currently 5 panel designs available including the Foliar range, but many more are in the pipeline – Nature never ceases to inspire.

Blog

Making paper blinds in the form of falling leaves for my bedroom, marked the beginning of ‘Dappleshades’, which was a stop-start affair. The original inspiration and then encouragement came from my mentor; her husband had put himself through university and paid the bills during the early years of their marriage with paper sculptures. Orders from …